Flagrancy

to Reason

demanding "thousands of hours and untold sums of money" from taxpayers in "good faith":

That's how Illinois lawmakers describe their federal handout in the continuing hubub over FutureGen. This is misplaced anger. There's at least 9,000 easy megawatts of wind power going untapped in this state, taking intermittancy into account it could replace at least half of our coal plants in short order. The $1.8 billion budget for FutureGen alone would keep pushing rapid wind power expansion in Illinois for years (it expanded by over 500% in 2007, from, granted, a starting point of nearly zero), instead it may slow this year with the recent expiration of federal incentives.

They let renewable energy subsidies get canned at the mere hint of a veto in the energy bill last December and they let them sink in the "stimulus" bill this past month, but a bad sci-fi project gets taken to the curb and they squeal like pigs. They could have at least have canned the federal "clean coal" spigot while they were playing tiddlywinks in Washington and level a little the wasteland of American energy policy.

Instead we get perverse subsidies for the carbon lobby and burning food. Thank heavens for the new Democratic majority. The sad sacks can't even keep what little incentives there were when they were masquerading as the opposition. With this kind of performance we'd be much better off with the Libertarian Party's energy policy: doing nothing at all.

How can an intermittant power source such as wind and solar replace base load power sources such as coal and nuclear? You can't turn them up and down to meet demand and the technology does not yet exist to efficiently store the power for when it is needed. Solar and wind are supplements, not substitutes, and if you look at their production and expected lifetimes they aren't as clean as you might expect.

Its fun to rant, but if you want your air conditioner running on those windless, 90 degree August nights, you better accept the reality of the situation